This is Liam Guilar's Blog, mostly about poetry, mine and other people's, and anything else of interest. Over the years it has unintentionally developed into an online poetry resource, check the names in the sidebar but Bunting, Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Tennyson and the medieval poets get fair coverage. Lady Godiva and Me was a sequence of poems that linked Lady Godiva, both the historical Godgifu and the legendary Lady G, to a character growing up in the city of Coventry after the second world war.
You can see a short film about the collection Here.
My most recent book of poems, Anhaga is published by Vanzenopress and avialable from my website. Further information, full length articles and sample poems are available on my website Here .

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Monday, June 4, 2012

So I’ve already moaned about the pre-publicity
for The Sunlit Zone, by Lisa Jacobson. Three meaningless statements, which have
now morphed into the blurb on the back cover and seem to suggest the publisher
is not interested in attracting anyone’s attention to this book, which is a pity.

To sum up the blurb, The Sunlit Zone is apparently “A risk taking
novel in verse with pure poetry in which romance joins hands with science and
takes to the water.”

But “novel in verse” implies a narrative,
and the minimum information a prospective buyer might want would be characters,
plot and setting. Imagine putting The Da Vinci Code, The Brothers Karamazov and The
Story of O down on the table and saying: “three novels in prose, and that’s
all the information you need, so pick one.”

A first person female narrator relates her
autobiography, alternating between Present tense (2050/51) and her past
(literally from the act of her conception in 2020 . Ab Ovo in deed). In
doing so she comes to terms with her twin sister’s death, her awkward relationships
with her friends and family, the ghostly boyfriend who returns, and after the
father’s death and her mother’s art exhibition, finds happiness and, if not love, then satisfying sex with the no longer ghostly
boyfriend. Coherence is primarily
the fictional narrator’s autobiography.

It’s set in a faintly dystopian future
Australia with many technical widgets and gadgets and cloned whales and other mutant
sea creatures.

There’s nothing here that wouldn’t attract
the average reader of modern prose. The publishers could have put tongue firmly
in cheek and promoted it as Sci-Fi Chick-Lit (although that would have been unfair).
It feels like a softer version of
some of the stories Ellison was publishing in the Dangerous Visions series, or
Ursula Le Guin’s writing for adults. Or, stripped of the SF trappings and closer
to home, like Stephen Herrick’s ‘A
place like this’.

There’s nothing here in the poetry either
to alienate a prose reader. No Post Modern Avant-Garde experimental Language games.
(This is neither criticism nor praise, just a comment) The story is told in a series of
tightly controlled stanzas, almost all of which are end stopped. The result is that the text mimics a
rhythmically organised speaking voice, though the formal quality of the stanza shifts the voice away
from the impression of a natural speaker which can sometimes be produced in
good first person prose. The sections alternate between the now of telling and past
phases of the narrator’s life.

Although lacking the pace of The Monkeys’ Mask or the technical virtuosity of ‘Freddy
Neptune’, the rhythmic control keeps the story moving. Whether or not it’s “Pure poetry”
depends on your definition of that vacuous term. As Clare Kinney pointed out, narrative poetry has to
negotiate two binaries: Narrative/Poetry and Narrative/Lyric. Modern readers
(and critics) tend to assume narrative will be in prose. ‘The Sunlit Zone” doesn’t dissolve the
binaries but tends to sit firmly on the narrative side of both of them. Pace is perhaps won at the cost of the
absence of the kind of image or
phrase that might make a reader pause and reread it. Whether that means the
book won’t reward rereading is no more an issue than it is with any other
narrative.

Is it risk taking? Perhaps it is, though if it is, it’s a sad comment on modern
poetry. By narrating them; sex,
birth, death, loss, family, develop contexts. The narrative returns the human
subject and human concerns to poems in a way lyric poems on these subjects
don’t. It also takes the obvious
narrative risk. Just as with any novel, if a reader doesn’t like the
characters, or the plot, or the setting, he or she will stop reading.

But this book should attract a much larger
readership than it is probably going to. It could escape the narrow confines of
Poetry World and find a wider range of readers than the usual buyers of poetry books.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Reading the furor Pound’s early
translations caused it’s easy to be pulled up short by the brutality ofthe last paragraph in William Gardner
Hale’s review ofHomage to Sextus Propertius in Poetry (Chicago):

If Mr. Pound were a professor of Latin , there
would be nothing left for him but suicide. I do not counsel this. But I beg him
to lay aside the mask of erudition. And If he must deal with Latin,I suggest he paraphrase some accurate
translation. And then employ some respectable student of the language to save
him from the blunders which might still be possible.

And to feel that
Professor Hale, had not only overstepped the mark but had missed the point and
was wrong. As Michael Alexander (1979) wrote of Pound’s (in)famous version of the
Anglo-Saxon “Seafarer”:

The critical responses
to Homage to Sextus Propertius sound
like the examiners had taken over the reviews.But reading it all I’m left wondering which of the two words
in “Pound’s translations ‘ is really the target.

Pound was consistently
“guilty” of writing in just as vitriolic a manner.He had preached the gospel of the professional poet and the
professional critic “down the public’s gullet”:

In a country in love with amateurs, in a
country where the incompetent have such beautiful manners and personalities so
fragile and charming that one cannot bear to injure their feelings by the
introduction of a competent criticism, it is well that one man should have a
vision of perfection and that he should be sick to the death and
disconsolatebecause he cannot
attain it.”(1914: The Prose Tradition in Verse.)

So he could not have been surprised when
the professionals responded to his arrogant dismissal of their understanding of
the Latin poets and, by pointing out his errors, showed conclusively that in their eyes, he
was the amateur.And a poor one at
that. Professor Hale,author of
the superbly titled : “The Cum-constructions: their History and Functions”
and“The Art of Reading Latin-How
to Teach it” took Pound to task:

Mr Pound is incredibly ignorant of Latin. He
has of course a perfect right to be, but not if he translates from it. The result of his ignorance is that much
of what he makes his author say is unintelligible. I select a few out of about
three-score errors…(Hale p52)

What the arguments over his translations
remind me is that the history of Poetry is not the record of an inexorable
Darwinian progression of poetic forms towards a today which yousomehow assume is the best that has
been.In Pound’sversion of literary history,Poetry, with its capital P, is
somethingthat can be objectively
discussed and analyzed, just as the flatness of the earth could be.For those who believe this version
(like Stead in “The New Poetic” or Kenner in “The Pound Era”)the literary battles of the past were
fought by heroic forbears whose victories moved the progression onwards. Just
as Galileo fought against ignorance to prove the world turns.Eliot and Pound waged their war against
the stultifying conventions of late 19th century verse and bought
poetry kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.(The metaphors are usually
equally physical, martial and heroic.)

In this version critics like Hale were
simply wrong. They stand in for the ultimately ineffectual opponents of a
Galileo or a Harvey.

Reading the reviews and articles from the
time, however, one is reminded that poems are written by people, and the
history of poetry is a history of back stabbing, back scratching,
infighting,an entertaining if
grubby record of squabbling for prestige and position. Or as K.K Ruthven put
it:

'The Feuds and the factions, the intrigues and the
infighting, the machinations of one upmanship, the economic and erotic
foundations of reputation mongering, the conspiratorial exclusions, the cult
figures and the camp-followers, the groupings and the groupies.'After detailing the back scratching and
log rolling and infighting Ruthven points out that 'The only people short
changed by these practices were readers naive enough to believe that criticism
is produced by impartial experts".

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Hale's review is in Poetry Chicago. The quote from Michael Alexander is from "The Poetic Achievement of Ezra pound" and K.K Ruthven's is from "Ezra Pound as Literary critic"